Macroblog

About Me

Crowdsourcing: A Definition

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.

May 11, 2010

Last week, we launched a contest to design our the official One Book, One Twitter crest. We got some truly creative and inspiring entries. They were so impressive, in fact, that Neil Gaiman himself has decided to get in on the fun. Out of the nearly thirty badges that were submitted, he's picked his three favorites. We'll have one final period of voting that will last for 48 hours. For this round of voting, we'll be using Reddit, the same tool that we used to choose American Gods as the first #1b1t selection. Go here, at Wired.com to vote.

As we mentioned before, the winning badge will become the official "badge" for One Book, One Twitter. It will appear on our Twitter and Facebook pages. But the fun doesn't stop there: we're working with Mr. Gaiman and Harper Collins to have 1b1t imagery appear in bookstores as well! We'll have more details on that as we hash things out.Lastly, despite the fact there can only be one ultimate winner, we're so impressed with the effort put forth by the community, we want to get some ideas from everyone for things we could possibly do with the other images. One idea the board came up with was to try and partner with an online retailer such as Zazzle or Cafe Press, to make the 1b1t badges available as t-shirts, with proceeds from sales going to a literacy-related charity yet to be determined. This may take some logistical effort than we realize right now, but it's just one idea. If you have others, we'd love to hear them in the comments.

Now back to the matter of choosing a badge. Below, you'll see each of the three badge finalists, but remember to go here to vote. Happy voting!

May 06, 2010

(I'm calling these "lab notes" because One Book, One Twitter is One Big Experiment. I hope you'll all contribute to these notes.)

Last night a tweet came in over the #1b1t transom. The content of the tweet—that the writer had barely started reading American Gods before having to go to sleep—isn't what struck me. It's that the author is a woman in Malaysia wearing a hijab. I was recently asked by Neha Dara of the Hindustan Times how I would define #1b1t's success. I didn't, but should have replied: "By virtue of the fact you're interviewing me." My deepest desire was to give many people from around the world with nothing in common one thing in common, and that seems to be happening.

Now on to the nitty gritty.One of the first wrinkles we've faced concerns whether to break book discussions up by chapter, using separate hashtags. We have established an official system of hashmarks. It goes like this:

#1b1t: General Discussion

#1b1t_1c: Discussion of Chapter 1 (and prologue material)

#1b1t_2c: Discussion of Chapter 2

... and on until we hit Chapter 19.

Why do this? I immediately thought this was a good idea because it seemed yesterday our traffic would quickly overwhelm the #1b1t hash. As always, I put the decision out to the community. More worrisome was the issue of spoilers, in which some readers give away plot points to other readers. There seemed to be a rough consensus that chapter hashes were a good idea. The question was what hash to use.

Namely, if we separate out the chapter hash from the main hash—as in #1b1t #1c (notice the space!) then anyone searching for #1b1t is able to see all the chatter, and can then do separate searches for the chapter chatter. In addition, this allows all conversation around the book to employ the #1b1t hash, allowing One Book, One Twitter to trend. An eloquent (and damn persuasive) defense of this logic was written up this morning by @shamsensei.

However, I ultimately went with the current system for two reasons:

1) I think the spoiler concern is substantial. People just jumping on #1b1t shouldn't be exposed to information about later chapters, thus ruining their reading experience. Gaiman offers a thrilling rollercoaster of a book, and we don't want to ruin any of those thrills.

2) I'm not sure we do want to go EPIC, as it's known on Twitter. If we get on trending topic leaderboards, we'll become a spam magnet.

Am I right about all this? Dunno. One thing I'm concerned about is going back at this point. To try to impose a new system on everyone when there's already been a day of uncertainty might kill the project altogether. That said, if it's evident that the current system isn't working, we'll start a new one. Or everyone will do it with or without me because, as I've noted a zillion times, the coolest thing about this is that no one is running the show. Rather, everyone is. Awesome.

May 04, 2010

Tomorrow morning is the official premiere of One Book, One Twitter (#1b1t). For anyone just arriving, huffing and puffing, to the shindig, we're reading American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. So now that we know what we're reading, we still have to answer the question: how do you get thousands of people to read one book together without ruining the suspense and twists for anyone? After all, some people like to read in delicate sips of ten or twenty pages, while others — like me — prefer greedy three or four hour binges. And many of you have already devoured the entire book, or are reading for the umpteenth time!

You can read (or reread) any way you want during the next eight weeks – God help us if we tried to stop you – but please, please be kind to others and stick to the following schedule for your comments. That way even the most delicate readers among us will have a chance to enjoy Gaiman’s finely-crafted thrills.

If you feel slightly queasy about tackling such a big book, use this schedule to divvy up the task into manageable chunks. Each week, this schedule covers 70-100 pages, which you can nibble down bit by bit every night before bed, or gobble down in one great, lazy Sunday bender, but keep in mind that the discussion of anything in those chapters is fair game starting from day one. Happy reading everyone, and remember to follow @1b1t2010 for updates and to add the #1b1t to your tweets!

April 29, 2010

About a month ago I proposed a scheme, that everyone in the world (or at least, those of us with access to the Internet) all read one book together this summer. To my great delight and satisfaction, thousands of people said, in effect, "Hell Yeah." I further proposed that in the spirit of democracy and crowdsourcing and all of that, we should collectively decide on what book that should be. That meant a few weeks of nominating, a few weeks of voting on the finalists, and a little bit of understandable bitching and moaning from people who just wanted to get on with it, already.

So now we're ready, right? I've been informally polling the community that's sprung up around #1b1t (that's Twitter speak for "One Book, One Twitter), and I've got two answers to that question:

1) Yes—If you've got a copy of American Gods handy, and are itching to star reading, go crazy.

2) Not quite—Many of you need some time to obtain your copy of American Gods. We've already received word that the book has been checked out by many libraries, and I'm currently talking to Neil's publishers to try to make sure the shelves remain well-stocked. Additionally, some people—myself included, actually—are in school this term, and are up to our eyeballs in highlighters and dense thickets of quantitative research.

So here's the plan. Start reading as soon as you want to, but in the spirit of no spoilers, avoid dishing about anything past Chapter 3 for the few weeks. We'll post a proper reading schedule in the next few days. And as always, this isn't my reading club, it's yours. I've done my best to create a consensus out of the chatter on #1b1t today, but make your voice heard in the comments below if you'd like to see us take a different tack.

April 27, 2010

Good morning nerds, readers, voters. A quick update to let you know that voting has been extended by one day. The reason for this is twofold: One, NPR is airing a segment about the project this afternoon, and it seemed ridiculous to close the voting mere hours after we received our first bit of national attention. Two, we can pretty much do what we want. Isn't that fun? Voting will now close at 12 AM, end of Wednesday. Reading will commence shortly thereafter.

April 23, 2010

[Editor's note. This is a piece I wrote for HuffingtonPost a few days ago. Thought I'd cross-post it here for posterity. It contains a deeper dive into my thinking behind the One Book, One Twitter project.]

In 1998 our nation’s most famous librarian, Nancy Pearl, posed a question to her fellow Seattleites: What if everyone in the city read the same book? The answer, she learned, was that a wildly diverse group of people would suddenly have at least one thing in common. That summer thousands came together to read The Sweet Hereafter by Russel Banks. Seattle loved it, and the "One Book, One City" phenomenon was born. Cities large and small started their own "Big Reads," and in 2003 Pearl was credited with starting the “most significant public humanities program in the past 10 years.”

I wouldn’t dream of second-guessing anyone with her own action figure, but I think the “One Book, One City” programs make a very industrial age assumption: Namely, that most of our relationships are determined by geography. On the Internet—where affinity is more powerful than geography—that's just not the case anymore. And so I’d like to ask a slightly more ambitious question: What if everyone in the world read the same book? We have the ideal technology at our fingertips—Twitter. All we need now is the book.

Toward that end I recently launched the world’s first global book club: One Book, One Twitter. And because it seems to me this should be democratic in every way, I asked, well, everyone to help decide which book we should all read. As you read this people around the world are voting on which book they'd like to read this summer, and gathering at the #1b1t hash on Twitter to discuss their choice. So far American Gods by Neil Gaiman has been leading the field by a
healthy margin, but strong lobbies have formed behind Gabriel Garcia
Marquez’ 100 Years of Solitude and Ray Bradbury’s Fahreinheit 451. By
the time voting ends next week anything could happen.

We've already drawn in thousands of people from Pasadena, Portugal, and Peoria. (Really. I'm not just being alliterative.) But of course, for this to truly reach a global audience, we need your help. If you like what we're doing, vote now, and spread the word. Tweet it, blog it, tell your friends. And go global. Voting ends at Midnight next Wednesday (April 28). After that, we'll all start reading, and tweeting, and reading, and tweeting.

What's the point of all this? First and foremost, to have a boatload of fun. The very people who most want to encourage reading often seem to treat books like brussel sprouts for the brain. Screw that. I’m taking the Cookies-and-Milk approach. Join One Book, One Twitter because a good story is unsurpassed fun, like rollercoasters and boogie boards and a ridiculously late night out with your friends.

As it happens, there's another layer to all this if anyone decides they need one: I believe a global, Twitter-based club has the capacity to build something academics call “social capital." I'm in the unusual position of playing college student again, and have been taking a graduate course in social capital with Robert Putnam, author of the book, Bowling Alone. Social capital is the WD-40 in our lives, the connections that result in new jobs, new spouses, and new friends. It's why George Bailey is the richest man in town. And what social scientists call bridging social capital allows connections to form between people who have nothing in common. Except, perhaps, that they happen to be reading the same book.

We can't make Sunnis love Shia, or or turn the Blue and Red states into the United States, or make everyone accept a two-state solution. We can all read one book, though, and maybe all get to know each other a bit better.

Vote for your choice for the One Book, One Twitter here!

Follow @crowdsourcing and #1b1t for updates and to join in the conversation.

April 12, 2010

Want to spend the summer following John Joseph Yossarian trying to survive World War II, or with Holden Caulfield on his misadventures through New York City? Maybe you'd rather endure the bombing of Dresden with Kurt Vonnegut's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Now's your chance to decide as we officially open the voting for One Book, One Twitter. We'll keep the polls open for the next two weeks, at which point the winner will be clear to everyone. At that point we'll start reading. (Miss that link above? Then go here to vote.)

For anyone just joining us, One Book, One Twitter (#1b1t) is an effort to get everyone on Twitter to read the same book this summer. Usually such "Big Read" programs are organized around geography. Seattle
started the trend for collective reading in 1998 when zillions of
Seattlites all read Russell Banks’ book, Sweet Hereafter. Chicago followed suit with To Kill a Mockingbird a few years later. This Big Read is organized around Twitter, and says to hell with physical limitations. Over the last few weeks thousands of people from around the world nominated six books to include on the list of finalists.

As long time listeners will notice, we've added four more books to the mix: 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger; God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy; and Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. These titles were chosen by the One Book, One Twitter board. Here's our reasoning—the crowd picked six wonderful books, but they're all written by white men with, well, a healthy disregard for reality. That's not a dis—hell, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five are two of my all-time favorite novels. But it's bound to appeal to a limited constituency. And besides each one of the additional four is a masterpiece in its own right, so who can complain?

As always follow @crowdsourcing and #1b1t for updates. Comments and complaints should be filed to me at the crowdsourcing blog. The rules around the voting have changed slightly. Each person is allowed one up and down vote for each title, but we are not—obviously—taking further nominations. Good luck to all our contestants, and may the best book win.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. 352 pps.Mangos are pickled, and hope is too, in Roy’s quirky, brutal, Booker-award-winning novel about two young twins, a lonely mother, and an untouchable with beautiful hands.

Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. 337 pps.Macon "Milkman" Dead III has been known as a momma’s boy ever since he was a kid. Now he has to figure out who he really is while avoiding the two people who want him dead. Nobel Prize winner, 1993.

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. 288 pps.Extraterrestrial adventures on the planet Tralfamadore meet the WWII fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, in this cult classic about an optometrist who becomes “unstuck in time.”

Brave New World, by Aldus Huxley. 288 pps.Come for the drugs (Mmmmm … Soma), stay for the “feelies”—movies that touch all the senses. The Modern Library ranked Huxley’s 1932 novel fifth in its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century.

100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. 432 pps.Published in 1967 and translated into over 100 languages, Marquez’s magnum opus was not only lauded as a crowning achievement in magical realism by critics, but also became the best selling Spanish language book in modern history, after Don Quixote.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. 480 pps.Don’t call it science fiction. Gaiman’s Hugo- and Nebula-award winning novel is “a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road trip wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit.”

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. 453 pps.Published in 1961, Catch-22 was the original indictment of the absurdism of war, and the army, and bureaucracy in general.

Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. 276 pps.Without Holden Caulfield, angst would just be another German word for anguish.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. 201 pps. Tired of all those dystopias? Try this dystopia! Bradbury envisions “a hedonistic anti-intellectual America that has completely abandoned self-control,” in which “firemen” extinguish any flicker of an intellectual life.

April 05, 2010

I spent a good share of last week poring over election results for the One Book, One Twitter (#1b1t) project. I don't think anyone will be surprised to hear that American Gods, a Hug0 Award winning novel, won handily with an aggregate of 431 votes.

That said, AG didn't win as easily as we anticipated. Fahrenheit 451 came in a relatively close second with 358 votes. (Quick explanation of Scoring: Votes recorded here reflect the difference between "Up" votes and "Down" votes—Thus F451 received 611 Ups and 253 Downs for a total of 358 votes). 1984 came in close behind with 348 votes. These three books dominated the leaderboard, as they had from almost the first minutes we opened voting. This reveals something about social media and online voting, where a considerable advantage goes to those books nominated early in the process. The mechanics behind the final round of voting next week won't have this bias.

The books to come in fourth and fifth place were Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22, with 113 and 104 votes respectively. The One Book, One Twitter board will be adding four more titles to this list to make a slate of ten finalists. We'll be voting on these books for a few weeks starting on April 12. Whatever book wins that is the book we'll read. Woo Hoo!

A bunch of entries deserve honorable mention: Someone suggested "Books about Twitter," which received 82 "Good God, No!" votes and exactly one "Yes" vote. A few other titles managed to pick up considerable steam, but someone—script kiddies, I know you're out there—seems to have marshalled enough "no" votes to keep them out of the final count. These include Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. I'm not sure any single one of these would have made it into the final six, but I found it suspicious that Art of Racing, for instance, had 147 Yes votes, and 176 no votes. One problem with this round of voting—as many of you pointed out—was that we allowed multiple nominations of the same title. American Gods, for instance, had 28 separate entries for it. This proved confusing—Our apologies. The next round won't allow submissions of course, just the ability to vote on the ten finalists.

Again: Voting starts a week from today, but we'll be announcing the four "judges choice" books later this week.

March 26, 2010

First, a point of order: You guys f*cking rock. In a world rife with partisan rancor, there's one thing we can agree on: We all love books. Here's what we don't agree on: What book we should read! And therein lies all the fun.

As most of you have noticed, American Godsby the inimitable Neil Gaiman is currently in the lead, followed by such beloved works as Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell's 1984. As many of you have also noticed, I've made no pretense of neutrality. Of these three, I personally favor the Bradbury, but if the people want Gaiman, I will read him as cheerfully and enthusiastically as anyone else.

That said, what I think we really want is a book that is 1) widely accessible; 2) translated into Swahili, Welsh and a zillion other languages; and 3) will appeal to the broadest and most international audience possible. It should even be a book that some people have already read, so that even certain people without time to read can join in. Maybe that's American Gods, maybe that's Fahrenheit. More likely, it's something like Catcher in the Rye. At any rate, here's what I promise: Other than using the bully pulpit to persuade, I won't put a thumb on the scale. This isn't my project; it's our project.

Here's what's going to happen next:

• We'll keep the nominating phase open until Midnight EST Tuesday.

• At that point we'll take the top six titles and put them in a basket. The One Book, One Twitter advisory board will add four more titles, and on the following monday, April 12 FCFCFC we'll open up voting for the final selection. Voting will remain open for two weeks, at which point the winner will be declared.

March 18, 2010

I have a dream. An idea. A maybe great notion. Actually, as Auggie March might say, "I got a scheme." What if everyone on Twitter read the same book at the same time and we formed one massive, international book club? Usually such programs are organized by big city libraries. Seattle started the trend for collective reading in 1998 when zillions of Seattlites all read Russell Banks' book, Sweet Hereafter. Chicago followed suit with To Kill a Mockingbird a few years later, and then other cities started jumping on the bandwagon. When the program works—and it doesn't always—it gets more people reading, more people talking, and more people generally appreciating the written word. What's not to like?

A few weeks ago I was reading about the Chicago's read-along for a grad seminar on social capital I'm taking with Robert Putnam this semester. My strong suspicion (and I'm hardly alone) is that networks like Twitter are rife with social capital, especially the so-called "bridging" social capital that connects communities of people who have little else in common. The thought struck me that Twitter would provide a much better platform for a book club than the mere accident of physical proximity. Just think, we could supplant #howyouathug with #chapterfourexegesis in trending topics! Actually, no, we probably couldn't, and that's not the goal anyway. I love books. So do you. Let's love one book together, our actual geographical location be damned.

• Soon After That: We start reading, and tweeting, and reading, and tweeting.

In the meantime, the hashtag for One Book, One Twitter is #1b1t. If you want to keep up to date, follow me, @crowdsourcing.

A few quick notes: This is not a book club, per se. There are some wonderful book clubs on Twitter, including #thebookclub and the Twitter Book Club (#tbc). The aim with One Book, One Twitter is—like the one city, one book program which inspired it—is to get a zillion people all reading and talking about a single book. It is not, for instance, an attempt to gather a more selective crew of book lovers to read a series of books and meet at established times to discuss. The point of this—to the extent it has a point beyond good fun with a good book—is to create community across geographical, cultural, ethnic, economic, and social boundaries.

At best we start an annual summer Twitter tradition, and bring a bunch of people from all over the world to read together. At worst a handful of us pick a book in an ad hoc fashion and we'll simply have started another Twitter book club, and—if you're a word nerd—how bad could that be?

February 24, 2010

Is there anything cooler than citizen science? Is there anyone nerdier than me? Nope and nope.

Help them spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Your work will give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way. And you could make a new scientific discovery.

January 27, 2010

It's a busy day for this Nieman. I've got Benjamin Buchloh at noon (see below), and then at 3 PM I'll be filming a Q&A for the Nieman Lab with Bob Garfield, host of the public radio show, On the Media and author of The Chaos Scenario. Then at 4:30 Bob and I take the stage at the Nieman seminar room to hear him talk about his book, and why we are all—those of us in media at least—totally fucked. (Those are Bob's words, by the way.) I'll be posting more about the seminar and linking to the final cut of the Nieman Lab video.

January 26, 2010

It’s been two weeks since I called David Kobia to launch Ushahidi’s crisis mapping platform in Haiti. I could probably write 100 blog posts on the high’s and low’s of the past 14 days. Perhaps there will more time be next month to recount the first two weeks of the disaster response. For now, I wanted to share an astounding example of crowdsourcing that took place 10 days ago.

What's special about the first week of the semester is that, not only do you get to sample an unnaturally wide variety of wares, but by studiously avoiding the "required reading" portions of each syllabus, it's possible to indulge in the illusion that you'll actually take every course you sit in on, including that daunting (and tantalizing!) course on quantitative linguistics. Alas, there are only so many hours in the day, and as my wife and I have discovered, small children demand that some of those hours be spent with them. So greedy!

At any rate, here's my lineup for day two:

History of Science 151: Modern Pasts and Postmodern Futures

This course analyzes the modern age through three complementary
perspectives. First, it offers a historical perspective focusing on
landmark changes of the period, particularly focusing on science
(Pasteur, Darwin, Charcot, Maxwell) and technology (steam engines,
rail, telegraphy, photography). Second, it analyzes the work of
important writers on modernity and civilization (focusing on Marx,
Bergson, Freud). Third: it studies theorists of postmodernity (mainly
Lyotard, Jameson, Habermas) who describe the benefits, dangers and/or
alternatives to modernity.

I sat in on the first 30 minutes of this class, and I had to cross my legs to hide my nerd lust. I love science and pretentious French postmodernists. Who knew there was a class in which Lyotard and Darwin unite? In the words of the great cultural theorist H.J. Simpson, "Woo Hoo!"

History of Science 162: Science in the Enlightenment

Explores practices of scientific theory, experimentation and
observation in Europe and North America, 1681-1815. Topics include:
Chemistry, Electricity, Astronomy, Mathematics, Natural History,
Newtonianism, Science and the Public Sphere, Science and the State,
Science and Rationality, Science and Utility, and Science and the
Industrial Revolution.

And I sat in on the last half of this course. Also tempting. A whole week devoted to one of my preoccupations from last semester, changing notions of time. Ever heard of "deep time?" I hadn't either. Sadly, this conflicts with the other history of science class above.

What is meaning, and how do we use it to communicate? We address the
first of these questions via the second, presenting an
interdisciplinary approach to the study of human languages. We
investigate language as the product of a natural algorithm, that is, a
computational facility which grows spontaneously in our species and
enables us to expose out thoughts and feelings. Our investigation uses
formal models from logic, linguistics, and computer science. These
models will also shed light on human nature and basic philosophical
issues concerning language.

This one is a little too hearty of fare, even for my substantial appetite. Plus, the professor won't allow auditors to sit in on sections. This is part of the politics of being a Nieman fellow, by the way. Professors generally welcome us—sometimes enthusiastically—to their courses, but due to (I think) administrative restrictions won't let us attend the smaller meetings led by the teaching fellows. This is a problem on a class like this one, where I'd need more, um, intimate assistance if I'm to work out the complex math involved.

Government 98qa: Community in America

Has the social fabric of America's communities and the civic engagement
of its citizens changed over the last generation? Why? Does it matter?
What lessons might we find in American history? These questions are at
the focus of this seminar.

I was born to take this class. Kidding, but only kind of. Anyone who's read my book knows I've wrestled a lot with Putnam and his ideas around community. This is the one course I'm most interested in taking this semester, and it starts in five, so I'm out.

January 25, 2010

Today marks the first day of the winter semester, but if you're imagining Timothy Bottoms and John Houseman matching wits, you've got the wrong idea. The first few weeks of classes are dedicated to course shopping, in which students cram into the most popular courses hoping to land one of the precious spots, and faculty try to sell their courses to increase enrollments. It's a mating ritual of sorts, and great fun. Here's Harvard grad Ross Douthat describing it in The Atlantic Monthly a few years ago: "There is a boisterous quality to this stretch, a sense of intellectual
possibility, as people pop in and out of lecture halls, grabbing
syllabi and listening for twenty minutes or so before darting away to
other classes."

Boisterous may not put quite a fine enough point on it, so far as we fellows are concerned. Our tenure at Harvard is so short—I often joke that they let us into the candy store, but only gave us a nickel—that I think I speak for us all when I say there's an immense pressure to pick the right courses right from the start. You can help, or at least, I'll be curious for your thoughts. I'll be blogging my courses all week. Here's what I'll be shopping today:

Historical Study B-43: Slavery/Capitalism/Imperialism: The US in the Nineteenth Century

This course treats the history of the 19th-century US and the Civil War
in light of the history of US imperialism, especially the War of 1812,
the Mexican-American War, and the illegal invasions of Cuba and
Nicaragua in the 1850s. Likewise, it relates the history of slavery in
the US to the Haitian Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, Indian
removal, Atlantic cotton, land and money markets, and the hemispheric
history of antislavery.

I've been a history nerd since I was in grade school, and last semester I concentrated on post Civil War 19th Century American history. I've tended to underestimate the role race and slavery's effects have played in, well, just about everything. This course could act as a corrective to that, but what I'm really interested in is developing some historical research chops. Next:

English 141: The 18th-Century Novel

The rise of the novel, seen through eighteenth-century fiction by
Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, plus
films, paintings, and engravings, magazine articles, and excerpts from
literary and social theory. Issues include genre (what differentiates
novels from epics, romances, newspapers, correspondences, biography,
pornography?), modernity (what was novel about the novel?), gender,
reading, and pleasure. Lecture-discussion format.

For years I've maintained a half-formed (okay, ill formed) idée fixe concerning the birth of the novel. Cultural commentators, pundits, the rest of us ... we all tend to treat the novel as something ahistorical, immutable, and yet it's a fairly recent cultural innovation. Plus, I've always wanted to read Fielding and Defoe.

History of Art and Architecture 175k: American and European Art, 1945-1975

This course will examine artistic production in the US and Europe
between 1945 and 1975 to clarify some of the most crucial questions of
this thirty year period: How did post-war visual culture repress or
acknowledge the recent 'caesura of civilization' brought about by World
War II?; how did the neo-avant garde position itself with regard to the
legacies of the avant gardes of the 1920s?; how did artistic production
situate itself in relation to the newly emerging apparatus of Mass
Media culture?

I've left professor names out of the descriptions thus far, but it's often a big (or even biggest) factor that goes into one's decision. The above course is being taught by Benjamin Buchloh, a well-known critic and art historian. Buchloch wrote frequently for ArtForum when I interned there back in the mid-90s, and I found his prose to be occasionally brilliant but generally impenetrable. He'd always personified the gratuitous abstruseness of art criticism to me, but part of my Harvard experience has been re-evaluating my prejudices against Frankfurt School-inflected cultural criticism, and maybe this course will be part of that. If nothing else, I'm hoping Buchloh will give good slide.

January 20, 2010

I woke up this morning, stumbled downstairs and flipped open my laptop. Who was there to greet me but an old—and estranged—friend. As often happens in these scenarios, the conversation quickly took an awkward turn.

Me: "I am, yes ... Look, I've totally been meaning to write. In fact, you probably noticed those posts in the drafts folder? I think I could still turn a few of those ... well, one is especially ... uh"

Blog: Meaningful silence. Blog glares in reply.

Me: Awkward laughter. "Okay, look, I'm sorry. I know that doesn't count. But you don't know what it's been like! The courses here are insanely demanding. I mean, Harvard professors expect you to read, like, a book a day. Every day! Who does that? And then there've been the kids. We had to get them into new schools, and Finn's daycare is in the opposite direction as Annabel's, andnd then there's all these parties—"

Blog: Still glaring. "Parties? You couldn't post to me because of parties!?"

Me: "Well, um. Parties isn't the right word, maybe. I mean, they're at night. And there's alcohol. And food. And, well, we dance sometimes. But mainly we're discussing important things. You know, the future of journalism and whether the New York Times will start charging for content."

Blog: "You had to assemble the finest minds in journalism and ply them with cheap Prosecco to figure out whether or not the Times would do what every J-School freshman already knew they were going to do?"

Me: "Look. You're angry. I'd be pissed too. And I need to be honest with you. I just needed a break, okay? We spent a lot of time together over the last several years, and we always wrote about the same stuff. I've been ... well, I've been studying intellectual history. William James. John Dewey. Charles Pierce. Pragmatism. And I've also been working on ... short stories."

Blog: Looking baffled. "Oh. Short stories. About crowdsourcing?"

Me: Sighing with exasperation. "No, blog. Not about crowdsourcing. Actually, they're just about people. People, not crowds."

Blog: "I see. You know. You could post them here. I wouldn't mind. And the only people who come by anymore are marketing dorks who punched "crowdsourcing" into Google and wind up here by mistake.

Me: "I guess that's an idea. I could just blog about what I'm doing while I'm on my Nieman? About my classes, and the smart, funny stuff people say? You wouldn't mind?"

September 01, 2009

I should probably start off by apologizing for staying away from the blog for so long. But I won't. Sometimes life seems far more compelling—and certainly more demanding—than the blog. That said, I'm very happy to be back, and I look forward to providing far more regular updates in the coming (academic) year. And with that bit of foreshadowing ladled in, I have news:

I've left New York City, and for a time at least, my journalistic work. Tomorrow I'll start one year of study at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow. Generally there's no silver cloud in which I can't find a dark lining, but not this time. I'll sum up the Nieman gig thusly: You really, really want to be me. I have one year to take anything I want at Harvard and MIT. In return, I have to provide my benefactors with ... nothing! In fact, the only stipulation is that I do no professional work while I'm here. That's one deadline I'm sure to make.

Naturally the Nieman program has acquired something of a reputation as a paid vacation, but so far as I can tell that's patently unfair. The curators tend to screen for over-achieving, workaholic types, with the result that the fellows tend to be the types who'll close down the library night after night, despite the fact they're not receiving grades for their courses (we audit our courses.) To judge by my cohorts, this year will be no different. They are, without exception, a superlative bunch.

Niemans are accepted on the basis of a study plan: Mine is to continue researching the impact of social media—on business, politics and culture. I'll be doing much of that outside of my coursework, and plan on sharing much of what I find over this blog. To be continued ...

April 14, 2009

I'm generally not one for pimping panels (okay, okay, unless I'm on them), but I really do want to get the word out about this one. The Center for Strategic & International Studies is hosting a panel on "open innovation in government" at 3 PM today. I know—nothing like a handful of government bureaucrats quoting from white papers to liven up an otherwise drab, spring day. But if you're open gov geek (and isn't every red-blooded American?) this is a must-see. It features interesting thinkers ("open government champions," according to the press release) from an array of federal agencies, including USAID, NASA, and the State Department.

But most importantly, Beth Noveck, the New York Law School prof and longtime open government theorist, will be moderating. Noveck broke open gov ground with her Peer-to-Patent program (featured in—shameless plug alert—my crowdsourcing book), and is currently serving as the President's director of open government initiatives. She has consistently proven to have one of the most sophisticated visions of how government could use technology to collaborate with citizens, and her presence in the executive branch speaks well of the White House's genuine belief in technology's democratizing potential.

Appropriately, the panel will be streamed live, and Noveck will be taking questions from the peanut gallery (which is to say, us). Hint: Don't ask about marijuana legalization.

It's all terribly interesting, though not for any of the reasons people think. The incident signifies the end of one, increasingly troubled stage in the courtship between the President and social media, and — we can only hope — the beginning of another, more realistic and mature stage. At this critical juncture I'd like to offer some relationship counseling.

It's perceived by many that the forces of drug reform "hijacked" the White House’s Open for Questions platform. Indeed, decriminalization is nowhere to be found in any list of what Americans think are the most important issues facing the country. But this conclusion assumes the technology used by the White House is capable of creating a representative sampling of popular opinion. The tech doesn't do that, and we shouldn't expect it to. We possess other, highly effective tools for that job — they're called polls.

Open for Questions fits squarely within a genre of crowdsourcing I call "idea jams." These are often called suggestion boxes on steroids, or some such silly thing. But in reality they constitute their own evolutionary branch of brainstorming. Users don’t just submit ideas, but also vote and (usually) comment on them as well.

Idea jams are a big hit with the private sector. Companies like Starbucks, Dell, IBM and even General Mills have all adopted them, for the excellent reason that they’re a cost-effective method for product innovation, and inspire good will with your customers to boot. The best-publicized incarnation involves Dell's "IdeaStorm," which the computer maker used to tap its most loyal (or at any rate, most vocal) customers. They've now integrated some 280 suggestions into their product line. Tellingly, Dell used the same Salesforce.com platform that the Obama transition team used to produce the quickly — and justly — discarded Citizens' Briefing Book.

So if the idea jam format works for companies, why isn't it working for our President? A few reasons:

First, the White House isn't matching the right tool to the right job. "The whole point of [such exercises] is not to find the question that the whole group wants to ask and that is predictable – but to enable cognitive outliers to ask the unpredictable question — to promote ways of thinking about problems (and solutions) that are uncommon," writes Kim Patrick Kobza, CEO of Neighborhood America, which develops social software for business and government.

In other words, idea jams are built to allow people to discover the fringe question (or idea, or solution), then tweak it, discuss it and bring the community's attention to it. When Dell launched Idea Storm, it was "hijacked" by Linux die-hards which suggested (nay, insisted) that Dell release a Linux computer. These folks were "trolls" to the same extent the drug legalization lobby swamping White House servers are, and Dell struggled with how to deal with them.

The company's ultimate reaction is instructive. First, they merged all the Linux comments into one thread, giving much-needed daylight to other ideas. Next, they saw the value in what the Linux folk were saying. The loud and clear demand for an open source OS had revealed that there was a "constituency" large enough to justify enacting this particular "policy." Put another way, there was adequate demand to support a new product line. Three months after launch, Dell released three computers pre-installed with Ubuntu.

In this sense, last week's virtual town hall performed a valuable function. It highlighted an important, if non-urgent issue and stimulated an ultimately useful public dialogue. The problem was that the President's "Director of Participation" wasn't part of that conversation. Which brings me to my second point: Participation goes both ways.

"Idea management is really a three-part process," says Bob Pearson, who as Dell's former chief of communities and conversation rode heard on IdeaStorm. "The first is listening. That's obvious." The second part, Pearson says, was integration, "actually disseminating the best ideas throughout our organization. We had engineers studying IdeaStorm posts and debating how they could be implemented."

The last part is the trickiest and most important: "It involves not just enacting the ideas, but going back into your community and telling them what you've done." Starbucks, which maintains its own version of IdeaStorm, employs 48 full-time moderators whose only job is to engage the online community. In other words, Starbucks is investing the vast share of its resources in the second and third parts of the idea management cycle.

By contrast, the White House essentially used its platform as a listening device, and failed to participate in the ensuing conversation.

The White House faces technological and legal hurdles that Dell and Starbucks don't have to worry about, to say nothing of the political considerations of seriously entertaining a policy of decriminalization at the very moment when the White House most needs GOP votes.

If the goal is to allow citizens to express themselves, mission accomplished. But if President Obama truly wants to engage his constituents in a national conversation, to involve them in the hurly-burly of law-making, he'll need to evince a much better understanding of how the knowledge, opinions and, yes, wisdom, of a large populace can best be harnessed. For one, he could push Google Moderator to allow users to comment on each other's ideas. Disabling this otherwise standard feature neuters the Idea Jam process from the outset.

In its current iteration, Open for Questions isn't really enabling democracy, unless if by democracy we mean the "never-ending, small-bore struggle for advantage among constantly shifting coalitions of interest groups," a conception of politics articulated by the early 20th Century political theorist Arthur Fisher Bentley. This isn’t quite as uplifting a vision as the one we were treated to during Barack Obama’s campaign, but it may—in the end—be a more realistic one.

March 27, 2009

My crowdsourcing radar used to consist of Google Alerts and
a RSS feed from Technorati. Then I installed TweetDeck on my laptop. I'm not sure if it was the best or the worst thing I've
ever done. I had thought of Twitter as a broadcast tool, but it's become far more valuable to me as a listening device. I used to say that keeping track of crowdsourcing's growth was a full-time job (the punchline being that I already have a a few full-time jobs). Now it would take an entire newsroom (okay, a small one) to cover the diverse, imaginative—and occasionally wrong-headed—ways crowdsourcing is manifesting in our culture. Anyway, here were a few of the more significant developments from the week:

Open for Questions, or Open for Vote Rigging? President Obama held the first crowdsourced press conference. The administration used Google Moderator to collect questions from citizens, and vote for those already posed. Results were decidedly mixed. The marijuana lobby turned out in force, effectively stuffing the ballot box for decriminalization topics. My colleage Nick Thompson has done my work for me here, here and here. The long and short of it is that one interest group gamed the system to vote their concerns to the top. As scores of other people have pointed out, decriminalization is a legitimate topic for a press conference, but hardly represents a pressing issue. My read: Open for Questions highlights that the ideastorm model of crowdsourcing is still very much in a beta phase, useful for some applications and counter-productive for others.

An Index of CrowdsourcingBoy has this been a long time coming. Anjali Ramachandran, a strategist at London-based digital agency Made by Many, posted a wiki with 135 companies currently engaging in some form of crowdsourcing. It's a great start, and Anjali is asking us all to help expand it. Such efforts are crucial to the maturation and understanding of crowdsourcing. The phenomenon has grown so rapidly (and so haphazardly) that it's exceeded any single person's capacity to track it. I know there are a lot of crowdsourcing junkies reading this post. I'd encourage you all to go contribute.

Um, Do You Know How We Can Get Out of This Mess?Ireland's economy has been especially hard hit by the Great Recession. Enter "The Ideas Campaign," or "the People's Campaign for Economic Growth," an open innovation project operated and paid for by Irish Web consulting firm, AMAS. Here's Springwise: "Launched just a week ago, the Ideas Campaign is asking the citizens of Ireland to propose innovative ideas to boost
economic activity in the country across 19 key areas including
manufacturing, technology, construction, retail and education." Great idea. Horrible execution. The ideas are collected, vetted and posted back to the site without any opportunity for the community to vote, comment or otherwise interact with them. A perfect use for aforementioned Google Moderator. Would the Dope Lobby—or more to the point, some special interest—have gamed this site like they did President Obama's? Possibly, but that's an argument for enhanced moderation, not locking out the crowd's input on, well, the crowd's input. If it works for Ireland, maybe Iceland will give crowdsourcing a spin.

Smartsourcing vs. CrowdsourcingPete Peterson has a very thoughtful essay at techPresident this week in which he examined the Obama administration's mixed results from such crowdsourcing experiments as the Citizen's Briefing Book (another ideajam that was stampeded by the drug lobby). He advocates bringing together "select group of citizens."

The government can serve a vital role as
convener – bringing together smart people from a variety of viewpoints
to collaborate and debate online over particular policy initiatives.
These policy discussions – whether in wiki or blog format – can be kept
transparent and open to the public’s view, but as we have seen during
the Transition, these must be controlled in such a way as to prevent
hijacking by small, organized groups."

I couldn't agree more. I would just like to point out that smartsourcing (great term!) is crowdsourcing. In my original article on crowdsourcing as well as in my talks, I've always said, "First—pick the right crowd." This has theoretical underpinnings. Scott E. Page, who's probably done more work than anyone in collective intelligence, calls this a "crowd of models." Diversity will trump ability, he notes, but only if a certain level of talent and ability are mixed in with that diversity. At any rate, Peterson's post is the read of the week, in my view.